Wednesday, 30 October 2013

A
day ago, reports emerged that two men have now been convicted of murder and are
awaiting sentence. While always involving tragedy, this particular crime had a
particularly nasty element to it.

To
précis: Bijan
Ebrahimi, a disabled man living on the outskirts of Bristol, thought that he
saw local youngsters vandalising his flower baskets and decided to take
pictures of them doing so. Evidence, you might think.

But
a neighbour saw him and decided that it was obvious that photographing
youngsters meant that he was a raving paedophile. And the neighbour then spread
the word. And other neighbours fell for it – happy to believe that taking
photographs of youngsters means you’re a kiddy fiddler.

Ebrahimi
told the police about the vandalism – and about the harassment that had
started, but he was the one who was arrested on suspicion of breaching the
peace, as a mob cried ‘paedo, paedo’.

More
rumours were running around, with claims that he’d been burned out of a
previous home.

Released
from police custody with absolutely no charge against him – and the police had
checked his camera and his computer and found absolutely nothing of a dubious
nature – he was dead within two days, after being beaten into a state of
unconsciousness before white spirit was poured over him and he was set ablaze.

Lee James, a 24-year-old father, has admitted murder, and his
neighbour, Stephen Norley, has admitted assisting in the crime.

Various police and call centre staff are being investigated for
their role in the entire debacle, because they ignored Ebrahimi’s pleas for help.

And at the heart of this horrific series of events is the
apparent reality that merely taking pictures of youngsters or children is now
deemed, by some individuals – who then become the mob – as absolute proof of
paedophilia.

It is difficult to know where to start with this.

Salem, the Nazis, McCarthyism – we never seem to learn.

A widespread climate of paranoia exists about child abuse – even
after the Paulsgrove riots and the case of the Welsh paediatrician who was
driven from her home because some intellectually challenged individuals
‘thought’ that paediatrician and paedophile were one and the same, and then
further ‘thought’ that they should do something about it.

Or to be more accurate, this is paranoia about child abuse by
strangers – so-called ‘stranger danger’.

Yet the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the abuse
of children happens in the home and is perpetrated by family or friends.

Did you get that? The fact is that the vast majority of abuse is
by someone known to the child – not a stranger.

So how do we deal with this? How do we stop it happening again?

Well, to start with, greater responsibility from mainstream news
media would be welcome.

Part of the current culture of fear is down to sensationalist
reporting of a very few cases where abduction has been involved. It can, at the
least, create a perception of the dangers as being far more widespread than
they are.

At worst, it helps to provide the climate in which the mob
mentality can take over, and it can provide a sense of legitimacy for those who
might want to move toward actual vigilantism.

But then we see much the same thing in coverage of other issues
– not least at present, welfare.

As government has started a process of demonising the disabled
and anyone else on benefits, so much of the media has been complicit: choosing,
for ideological reasons, not to challenge statistics that, in some cases, have
subsequently been shown to be fictions.

The joys of a ‘free’ press, eh?

Innocent people ‘monstered’ and demonised – dead as a result –
and a point where merely pointing a camera at youngsters or children can see
you branded a paedophile.

And the mob doesn’t even question it.

Indeed, some commenting online have sought to suggest that Ebrahimi was obviously
‘dodgy’ for photographing the youngsters or children from inside his house.

That’s
right – blame the victim.

The
police have categorically stated that there were no indecent pictures on his
camera or computer, yet still people question why he was taking pictures at all
– and suggesting that that in itself is now an inherently dubious thing to do.

What
an utterly crazed idea. Do people really look at someone taking pictures in the
street and think, if there’s a child anywhere near: ‘what’s that nonce doing?’

The
facts of Ebrahimi’s death are hideous enough – and by god I hope that some
people in that area are feeling some damned serious guilt and shame right now –
but the fact that an entirely innocent action is being seen as an indicator of
something as serious as child abuse is pretty nearly as sick.

The
media need to show responsibility – but so do we, in stopping to actually think
before we leap to conclusions based on anything the media tells us and anything
any neighbour tells us as gossip.

And
we need to constantly ask the question of why on earth anyone would imagine
that pointing a camera is indicative of an act of abuse in the first place.

Tuesday, 29 October 2013

Thanks to the joys of time travel, we can now go back in time to find out how the Daily Mail marked the death of another artist who used drugs, other than Lou Reed.Thomas
de Quincey

August 1785-December 1859

Thomas
de Quincey, the notorious drug addict whose writings glamorised heroin for
thousands of readers and triggered so-called ‘addiction literature’, has died
at the age of 74.

The
son of a Manchester merchant called Penson, de Quincy’s father died when he was
just eight.

Thomas
was a sensitive and sickly child whose mother was very strict and gave her
children little sense of being loved. More concerned with her own intellectual
pursuits, three years after being widowed, she changed her name to de Quincey
and moved herself and her two sons to Bath, where Thomas was enrolled at King
Edward’s School.

Later,
mental weakness produced bouts of depression and he fled school and headed off
to find his hero, William Wordsworth, but gave up quickly and spent time living
as a vagrant.

It
was in 1804, while at Oxford, that he started experimenting with heroin,
claiming that he did so in order to cope with various ailments.

But
de Quincey’s lack of discipline struck again and he quit university after
failing to graduate, leaving to seek out a Bohemian lifestyle and the
acquaintance of poets.

When
he was 21, he received £2,000 from his late father’s estate, but spent it
unwisely, being overly generous and having an addiction to buying books. In his
later years, he had to hide, on occasions, in order to avoid the debt
collectors.

In
1816, aged 31, he married Margaret Simpson, and although he had no money, his
appetites took hold and they had eight children before she died in 1837.

It
continues to defy belief that a healthy, hearty woman of childbearing age could
simply die, as it is claimed she did.

De
Quincey struggled to hold down a proper job, gaining the position of editor of
the Westmorland Gazette in 1818, but resigning just a year later after the owners
complained about his performance.

In
1821, he went to London to work as a translator, but the publication –
initially anonymous – of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater brought him fame and a
way of sustaining himself financially, being asked to write for various
publications after its publication.

Until
the end of his life, his periods of most creativity coincided with his heaviest
drug use.

De
Quincey influenced various people – from the macabre American writer Edgar
Allen Poe to the scandalous Frenchman, Baudelaire and even the disabled and
sexually confused Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, while Berlioz’s morbid Symphonie
fantastique is based on de Quincey’s drug-addled work.

It’s
said that you reap what you sow – it is simply a wonder in de Quincey’s case,
that it took so long.

But
de Quincey, like other artistic, ‘sensitive’ types, legitimised and promoted
the anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-family excesses of the so-called
‘romantic’ movement, whose leading lights included the depraved Lord Byron.

“Oh!
Just, subtle, and mighty opium! That to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for
the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to
rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! That with thy potent
rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one
night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood....”

Those
were the words of de Quincey. A man who made no
apology for a life lived at full throttle. A man for whom the harvest took a
long time coming.

Monday, 28 October 2013

At
the end of a production period, when you’ve safely tucked up the publication in
bed, a little relaxation is always in order.

And
what could be better than the opportunity to gaze at some top-notch art for an
hour or so?

That
was the situation by mid-afternoon on Friday and, with dinner at Joe Allen and
theatre to follow, I had a nice little gap in my calendar.

And
given that I’d later be heading to the Aldwych/Strand, the best possible
solution presented itself in a first ever visit to the Courtauld Gallery.

Based
in the part of Somerset House that was originally designed for the Royal
Academy, which itself was founded 1768, it houses the art collection of the
Courtauld Institute of Art, a self-governing college of the University of
London that was founded in 1932.

Autumn Effect at Argenteuil, Monet

It
has a small, but renownedly fine collection and, for some reason or other, I’d
never visited.

First
up was the medieval room, which was devoid of any other human life when I
entered, and fabulously quiet.

But
just as a started gazing in wonder into a cabinet of remarkable carvings, the
door was shoved open and in burst a group of Russian tourists, cameras and
phones ready to snap anything and everything – and woe betide anyone who was in
their way.

Bang
went my chance of seeing anything properly, as I was shoved out of the way from
two sides (there was at least one brief apology), by phone-toting visitors
determined simply to snap, snap and snap again. They were not, I hasten to add,
youngsters.

Adam and Eve, Cranach the Elder

I
retired quickly to the first of the upstairs galleries, only to find them catch
up with me almost instantly.

Again,
the same pattern.

Having
spent a few minutes looking at Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the
Flight into Egypt (1563), which I realised that I remembered from school, I
approached Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve (1526), only for a
group to surround it with no interest in anything other than having a picture
taken beside it, making funny signs with hands near Adam’s groin.

Quickly
on then, through the rooms with the Gainsbroughs and the Rubens, into the
smaller, square Cézanne Room, where I plonked myself firmly on the square bench
in the middle and stayed put to wait them out.

Art’s
for everyone, and all that – and I’d love more people to see stuff like this
and enjoy it, but what the hell is the point of visiting a gallery or museum
and behaving like this?

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne

What
do you get from it – and it had better be pretty damned special if you’re going
to make such a negative impact on other visitors.

While
doing that ‘waiting out’, I set myself to concentrate on the painter’s Montagne
Sainte-Victoire from around 1887, sketching a very rough outline of it with a pen on
the lined page of a notebook in an effort to better understand the composition.
Which actually does work.

The
gallery’s Cézanne collection alone is worth the (£6) admission, and covers a
wide period in his productive life, up to a very late landscape, Route
Tournante,
from 1904, which looks unfinished as well as quite abstract, and also includes
the wonderful Man with a Pipe from 1896.

Nevermore, Gauguin

Looking
at these, I found it much easier to start to understand the difference between
Impressionism and post-Impressionism: it starts to make sense.

There
was no shortage of treats in just three rooms, including some Renoir and Degas,
with Monet’s beautiful Autumn Effect at Argenteuil (1873), plus Manet’s
vivid explosion of colour, Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil (1874) and the
iconic A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-82) being stand outs, along
with a sculpture by Rodin, van Gogh’s disturbing Self Portrait with a
Bandaged Ear (1889) and the lovely Peach Trees in Blossom from the same year.

Self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear, van Gogh

But
for me, one of the most important ‘new’ experiences was seeing two of Gauguin’s
Tahitian paintings in the ‘flesh’. The colour palate really reminded me of
Survage’s Collioure pictures, and they also have a sense of mystery about them
that adds to the fascination.

I
don’t know why – now – but I’d long assumed that they were quite exploitative,
but when you see them, you also see the dignity of the women in them. I was
wrong on that score, most defininately.

There’s
also a realism combined with a decorative element that makes a particularly
interesting contrast with The Haystacks, which the artist painted in
Brittany in 1889, which has a palate that seems closer to van Gogh than what we
perhaps most obviously think of Gauguin.

Upstairs,
though, came an unexpected treat.

As
I walked into a room of 20th century art and turned back to look what was hung
on the left of the door, it was to see André Derain’s Fishermen at Collioure, painted in 1905, in
that summer that, in effect, saw the beginning of Fauvism.

The Red Beach, Matisse

And
on the other side of the same door, The Red Beach by Matisse, also from
1905, and quite recognisably of Port D’Avall.

After
all the hunting for work in London by Matisse, finally here was not just ‘any
old work’, but something that I could comprehend and appreciate on a specific and quite personal level.

I
was thrilled almost to the point of tears – and telling innocent bystanders: ‘I’ve sat on that beach, I ‘ave’.

Other
exhibits that made an impact also include some Kandinsky, some Kirchner and a
room of Walter Sickert (a revelation) and Modigliani’s rather wonderful Female
Nude Sitting from 1916.

Slowly
I seem to ‘get’ modern art. Or actually, not so much slowly, but all in a
relatively short burst, after having spent decades – including my time studying
art formally at school – not doing so.

Sunday, 27 October 2013

Once
upon a time – and it feels a mightily long time ago – I did an awful lot of
theatre reviewing.

I
didn’t get paid for it, but I got tickets, which were a form of gold dust
anyway. And I got to pen reviews that were published in the UK’s smallest national
daily newspaper, The Morning Star, where I eked out a meagre daytime
living as, first, an advertising salesperson and later, as a sub-editor, sports
editor and duty chief sub-editor.

It
paid lousily, but it was a proper, old-fashioned way of learning a trade – and
there were always those theatre tickets.

On
a couple of occasions, I was taken out to dinner after a show by the
exceptionally charming and generous Clive Hirschhorn, the long-time film and
theatre critic of the Sunday Express, to whom I’d been introduced by
the Star’s then film critic, Jeff Sawtell.

Clive
(and partner) took pity on a hackette with renownedly piss-poor pay and no
expenses, and carted me (and Jeff) off after a show I cannot recall to eat at
Joe Allen’s, just off The Strand.

Since
this was in the days before I started to really enjoy culinary matters, I
remember nothing about the food. But I do remember sitting at one of the
circular tables in the centre of the basement restaurant, with Alan Rickman
right behind me, almost back to back, and having the devil’s own job not to
melt into a pile of goo just hearing that voice.

And
at some point, Su Pollard announced her arrival with a Hi-di-Hi-like holler as she
entered.

It
was love at first celebrity sighting.

I
went back with a friend on a few occasions, sitting in a corner and nursing a
salad starter and a glass of wine because that was what I could afford, but
relishing the atmosphere. I remember huge amounts of walnuts and cheese in vast bowls of leaves; the late-evening piano and face-spotting as actors came in after their own evening's work, and the red
brick walls covered in Broadway posters.

And
thus Joe Allen’s – a legendary place on a far wider scale; open since 1977 and under new ownership this year – became a legend for me.

But
that was a long time ago and, despite my best intentions, I had never revisited
and The Other Half, for all my waxing lyrical over it on more than one
occasion, had never been at all.

On
Friday, however, we were booked into the Vaudeville to see The Ladykillers. And since we needed to
eat, I was contemplating dinner in the vicinity.

After
musing over the possibility of going to Orso, a rather nice Italian restaurant
in another basement nearby, it struck me that this was the perfect chance to
try Joe’s again.

There’s
always a danger, when you nurse fond memories of something, that revisiting
will ultimately spell disappointment. And even more so when you’ve burbled on
about it for years to someone else and they’re now going to experience it first
hand.

And
anyway, what would the food be like?

Crab cakes and apple slaw

I
started with a cocktail – a mint julep, since we were, after all, in what is an
American diner meets a brasserie, and since I had, only a day earlier, been
listening to the late, great Robert Preston singing that it was the eponymous
Mame who gave his own “old mint julep a kick”.

I
am not usually a whisky person, but this mix of bourbon, mint, sugar and water
was very pleasant and refreshing.

From
the South, it was a step up to New England for crab cakes and an apple slaw,
with fries and a portion of buttered spinach on the side.

Oh
my, oh my. The crab cakes were pure crab, flecked with red chilli that cut
delightfully through the rich sweetness of the meat.

The
slaw, which was on a bed of endive, was bitter and fresh and light – and far
more than the garnish I’d rather expected (hence the order of spinach). There
was also a little light rose marie sauce on the side, while the fries and
spinach were equally top notch.

What
do you follow that with?

Well,
it was back down south for a slice of pecan and cranberry pie, with a quenelle
of whipped cream – cue Family Guy jokes about Stewie’s pronunciation
of ‘whipped’ – with a little cinnamon powder on top.

Pecan and cranberry pie with whipped cream

Seriously
rich and naturally sweet, like the fruitiest fruit cake ever, with cream that
was light as a feather, it was a superb end to a superb meal.

The
Other Half opted for a steak, followed by a chocolate brownie and ice cream.

Mind,
we stayed on this side of The Pond with wine – a glass of red for him and white
for me – both from the Languedoc.

Joe’s
is not a traditional diner with gingham tablecloths and red banquettes, but a
very classy venue with a very classy take on some classic American cooking.

Oh,
and the decor is wonderful for any theatre buff – we were watched over by
Marlene’s lidded gaze.

There
may not have been any face spotting to be done in our part of the room and at
that time of evening, but the atmosphere is comfortable, the food excellent and
the service good.

Briefly,
then, to The Ladykillers.

The
Ealing comedy has been rewritten for the stage by Graham Linehan of Father
Ted and
Black Books fame, and has received raves.

It
is a light evening’s entertainment, but it isn’t the film.

The Ladykillers

The
cast were great – particular mentions for Angela Thorne, Simon Day, Ralf Little
and Chris McCalphy as Mrs Wilberforce, Major Courtney, Harry Robinson and
One-Round.

It’s
not that John Gordon Sinclair was bad as Professor Marcus, but he never really
hits the creepy notes that are essential.

Monday, 21 October 2013

The
latest brouhaha about pornography broke out last week, as the Daily Mail set its hypocritical
sights on WH Smith.

The
unfortunate retailer’s crime? It found itself in the line of fire after an
online cataloguing error meant that pornographic or erotic ebooks were spotted
near titles for children.

The
Mail,
which doesn’t include the titillation of its audience as one method of making
sales; which doesn’t include and comment on as many acres of female flesh as
possible on its own website, and which doesn’t – oh no, sirree – use creepy
language to sexualise underage girls in that very same part of cyberspace, has
apparently read every one of the naughty ebooks that were available to buy and
announced that the subjects include rape and incest and beastiality and, and …
well, won’t somebody think of the children (but not the way Mail hacks do)!

First,
it effectively admitted that it hadn’t bothered doing any actual investigation
itself: “At least 60 pornographic ebooks – some
featuring rapes and bestiality – were available on the company’s online store,
and could also be found on Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble … according
to the Mail on Sunday.” [my
emphasis]

That’s cool: just rely on the always-reliable Mail family of
newspapers to feed you the details of the story. After all, this isn’t the Mail that has
a record of ‘exaggerating’ on such matters, is it?

“The National Crime Agency warned on Sunday that books appearing
to legitimise child abuse ‘might feed the fantasies of paedophiles and in some
cases encourage child sexual abusers to commit contact offences’.”

Woah! Where’s the child abuse thing come from? Where is there
even a suggestion that some of the ebooks – which are self-published,
apparently – include anything “appearing to legitimise child abuse?

Of course, the mere mention of kiddy fiddlers is enough to send
half the nation into a state that includes the shut-down of their reasoning
skills.

Odalisque with Magnolias, Matisse. Not erotic. At all

As it happens, other sources say that some of the books do
contain themes of abuse, but if that’s the case, let’s have it mentioned in the
article, without the sudden jump to the subject of paedophilia, which simply
looks like a conflation of child abuse and pornography/erotica.

But this is entirely in keeping with the sort of knee-jerkery
that is increasingly coming to inform the debate on whatever someone or other
decides constitutes porn.

After all, in what passes for that debate in the UK, claims of
the untold harm to women and children caused by pornography dominate, without a
shred of actual evidence for that. Yet it has become accepted unquestioningly
by many that it is simply true.

Say something often enough …

And the Mail and the Guardian are among
those publications that are culpable on this count. Which should tell you
something.

Mind,
since we also apparently live in a world where a convicted and time-served
criminal can herself state that most women commit crimes because of men,
perhaps certain people do need ‘protection’ from anything that might ‘deprave’
them?

Maybe
the Victorians were correct in believing that only respectable men of a certain
class (which class presumably ensured the aforementioned respectability) could
be trusted to look at dodgy images?

All
of this – every little bit of it – plays to a censorious, reactionary agenda on
women: one that is entirely happy to see womankind as vulnerable and as a
perpetual victim, and to shoehorn womankind as a whole into a particular and
limited template for ideological reasons.

At
its extreme – its logical conclusion, one might say – is the likes of the
Taliban.

Unfortunately,
many people who would claim to be progressives buy into it and blithely aid the
growth of a culture of victimisation, which demonises men and happily portrays
women as eternal victims of ‘the patriarchy’.

And
then, in response, we get the victimised white male routine.

This
is all at a time when the populace as a whole is under attack from yet another
government that readily does the bidding of the neo-liberal supra-national
corporatocracy – and in this case, uses the result of the 2008 financial crash
to batter the majority and set them against each other.

Against
such a background, playing at divisive politics is not even intellectual
masturbation, but far worse, it’s utterly counterproductive in terms of
rallying and uniting people around the key issues, which have sod all to do
with sex/gender and what turns people on, and everything to do with economics
and actual politics.

And
if anyone starts spouting off along the lines of: ‘if we only had more women in
Parliament’, respond with two words: ‘Margaret’ and ‘Thatcher’.

The
idea that somehow there’s some sort of unified feminine niceness out there
that’ll solve everything is, at best, a misguided fantasy.

Even
a cursory glance at history would suggest that, when women have power, they
behave no better or differently to how men behave.

But
that’s okay – because if we take on board the narrative of a certain type of
feminism, then women don’t have to take personal responsibility because it’s
all the fault of ‘the patriarchy’.

Which
brings us back to the point where, if you continue to argue that, then you
effectively argue that women are inherently weak – in which case, why,
rationally, should they be considered equal within society?

The
porn ‘debate’ is just one part of a wider war being waged by a number of
protagonists with some slightly differing perspectives.

Other
aspects of this war include, for instance, the male-dominated campaigns against
abortion and the right of a woman to control her own body.

But
if we believe that a woman should be able to have complete control of her own
body, then it is inconsistent to patronise, condemn or exclude women who, for
instance, work in the sex industry.

Do
those who do that condemn the rent boy equally? Or what about the female
‘escort’ who provides services for other women?

The
‘debate’ is so up it’s own metaphorical arse that you will, even now, hear
spectacular claims such as the famous one that ‘all porn damages women’. What?
Even the gay stuff?

It’s
also indicative of that divisionism: conflating all womankind to a single
version. There is no female or feminist consensus on these subjects, no matter
how much Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has apparently allowed himself to be
told by the merry little band of misandrists that he continues to give space
to.

You
don’t have to like porn yourself to see this. That’s not point. But get caught
up in the rhetoric, without understanding that, and you become just like the Daily
Mail
itself or the Guardian.

Ask yourself: would the campaign against page 3 exist if it wasn’t in a working-class publication?

Leather Crotch, Robert Mapplethorpe. Not sex. Art

If you think so, why is there no comparable campaign against odalisque paintings that hang in open galleries? Perhaps because visiting galleries is considered a rather middle-class thing to do? And, when it’s in a gallery, it’s Art anyway, isn’t it?

If there are issues about how availability of pornographic materials is affecting young people, then perhaps the answer is proper education?

However, given the generally parlous state of sex education across the UK – not least because governments still cravenly kowtow to religious groups, schools and parents in allowing them to opt out of proper sex education – it’s easy to see why a spot of ranting stupidity appears to be the preferred solution for some.

The thing is, porn’s a nice, easy target, because few people will defend it, so bound up are we ideas of sex as still rather dirty – certainly if it’s lust and not lurve – and because the moment the ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ soundbite gets bandied around common sense is bundled out of the room.

Now just imagine if the Mail in particular brought as much concern to the news that the Red Cross is now handing our food aid in the UK.

As I said: a useful distraction – and not for the good of women or men as a whole.

About Me

London-based journalist, writer, photographer and artist, with one Other Half and three cats.
This blog is about all sorts of things, but mostly reviews. My interests include comics and opera (and even comic opera), cats, tattoos and art.
100% personal. Non-PC. No 'party line'.
You can see some of my photography at http://amandakendalart.tumblr.com
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